by As an artist working across media, I have used everything from my voice to thread to poetically translate and convey information. Recently, I have been working with another medium – geological data sets.
While scientists use data visualization to display the results of a data set in interesting and informative ways, my goal as an artist is a little different. In the studio, I treat geological data as another subject, using it to guide my interactions with Mylar film, knitting patterns or musicals. Details, in my work, function both expressively and abstractly.
Two of my projects in particular, “rupture points” and “tidal places,” illustrate this way of working. In these pieces, my goal is to offer people new ways to relate personally to the vast scale of geologic time.
Rupture points
An early project where I treated detail as a medium was my letterpress series “rupture points.” In this series, I encoded data from cryogenic events, or ice tremors, to create knitting patterns.
My research continued into what I call “archival landscapes” working with earthquake data. These are places that have had different geological identities over time, like mountains that were once sea reefs.
Because knitted textiles have many individual stitches, I can use them to encode discrete data points. In a knitting pattern, or chart, a separate symbol is shown for each type of stitch. I used the open source program Stitch Maps to write the patterns for this project, translating the peaks and valleys of the seismograph into individual stitch symbols.
Knitting charts usually show these symbols in a grid. Instead, Stitch Maps lets them fall as they would when knitted, so the chart mimics the shape of the final textile.
I was drawn to the expressive possibilities of this feature and how the software allowed me to experiment with it. I was able to write patterns that only worked in theory and not as physical, hand-made structures. This gave me more freedom to design patterns that fully reflected the datasets without ensuring their viability as textiles.
Glaciers form incrementally as new snowfall compacts pre-existing layers of snow, crystallizing into an ice sheet. In the same way knitted fabric accumulates in layers, like a series of interlocking loops. All structures appear to be stable but could easily dissolve.
Ice quakes occur in glaciers as a result of calving events or the pooling of meltwater. Like melting glaciers, the knitting is always in danger of coming apart – but instead of melting, by twisting and tearing informally. These structural similarities between glaciers and knitting are reflected in the “rupture points” prints, where turbulent ice rifts translate into patterns that cannot be knitted.
The loop
Repeated interlocking loops are the basic units that make up a knitted textile structure. The loop also forms the seed of a work in progress I did during an artist residency with the NASA GEODES research group. I joined their research team in Flagstaff, Arizona, in August 2023. I helped collect data from sites within the San Francisco volcanic field, while also doing my own fieldwork: photography, drawing, note-taking and walking. .
One of my walks included a tour around a very visible geological loop – the rim of the SP cinder cone volcano. This is the second crater walk I have completed, the first tracing the subsurface rim of the Decorah impact structure in Iowa.
I see my paths through these landscapes as stands for yarn. Over time, by taking walks that trace craters, or geological loops, I will make a textile. The performance of something as familiar as a textile offers me a new way to think about something much more difficult to understand – geological time.
This article is part of Art & Science Collidea series that explores the intersections between art and science.
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Performance and tides
Performance has been a useful tool in my work, as it can help people understand and relate to geological processes.
The field of geology stems from a long history of extraction and colonial enterprise. In this context, land is valued for its economic importance – as a raw material to be harvested or a territory to be claimed. In my performances, I aim to interact with geology as an active entity in itself, rather than as a consumable resource.
In recent years, I have composed and performed two arias from tidal data.
The first, “marseille tide gauge aria,” came from 130 years of sea level data collected from tide gauges in the Bay of Marseille, France. I converted the annual mean sea level into a single note within my vocal range. The result of this was a composition that indicates a rise in sea levels in the bay as fields are getting higher in the Aria.
Its lyrics come from a somber poem in Rasu-Yong Tugen’s book “Songs From the Black Moon.” Each note of the aria expresses not only the measured level of the sea but also my emotional response to this set of data.
Last fall, the “marseille tide gauge area” was moved to the ionosphere, the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. This was done as part of artist Amanda Dawn Christie’s project, “Ghosts in the Air Glow,” using the Active High-Frequency Astronomy Research Program’s ion-effect research instrument, which is an array of 180 antennas that transmit high-frequency radio waves.
The Aria’s transmission was shown from the ionosphere, back to Earth and to shortwave radio listeners around the world.
For the second of these vocal pieces, “skagway tide aria,” I used forecast data as well as recorded tide data from Skagway, Alaska. With this data, I put together an aria for the Munich Climate Conference 2051, where speakers presented from the perspective of a climate-changed world 30 years into the future.
I was drawn to this particular data set because the falling tide levels in Skagway seem to contradict the global trend of rising sea levels. However, this is a temporary effect caused by melting glaciers that release pressure on the land, allowing it to rise faster than water levels. The effect will subside over the next half century, and Skagway’s tide will begin to rise again.
In the coming months, I will be working with geophysical data sets collected during the NASA GEODES field trips to write new arias. I want these pieces to continue to blur the divide between the human and the geographical, inviting listeners to think more deeply about their own relationship with the lands they use and inhabit.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
Written by: Sarah Nance, Binghamton University, State University of New York.
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The author’s projects with GEODES and Ghosts in the Air Glow were supported with funding from these organizations.
